Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Over on the Mailop list, a postmaster shared his tale of woe involving sending mail to a small set of recipients whose mail server is behind a Cisco PIX firewall. You can tell if a receiving site is using a Cisco PIX firewall by telnetting to port 25 of the site's MX and s…

Some or all of verizon.net mailboxes are going to move to infrastructure hosted by AOL.  Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise reports that Verizon is saying this only affects users in Florida, Texas and California. My guess is all other Verizon email users' mailboxes will be t…

Today's guest post is from Brian Curry, Manager of Deliverability, for Merkle Inc.. Take it away, Brian! Since July of 2015, Google rolled out a shiny new tool for the Deliverability community to poke around and nerd out. We all know Google hasn’t always been the most trans…

A few different folks have reported to me that when accessing Google Postmaster Tools , they were seeing this message being displayed instead of data: No data to display at this time. Please come back later. Postmaster Tools requires that your domain satisfies certain criteria …

Every so often somebody approaches me to ask me if B2B spam is OK now, because they get B2B spam at their work address. Everybody gets it, they presume, thus it must now be acceptable. Or it was always acceptable and those deliverability guys were just trying to mislead them be…

I'm blocking all mail from the new .top TLD , because I'm getting absolutely pummeled with spam from a spammer or small group of spammers rotating through .top domains, trying to hide who they really are. You might want to avoid the .top TLD for email purposes right now…

(A very old CBL logo.) Click on over to ArsTechnica if you want to learn more about the specifics of this particular spamming botnet army . The interesting bit (for me, anyway) is that the infected machines monitored the Spamhaus CBL blacklist and would request removal if foun…

In addition to the blacklists we all know and respect, Spamhaus maintains two other special lists: The  DROP (Don't Route Or Peer) and EDROP (Extended Don't Route Or Peer)  lists. These are lists of IP addresses and/or netblocks of the worst of the worst -- networks tha…

Over on the Bronto Blog, Waynette Tubbs reports shares a client's experience with email list stagnation, re-engagement, and how to deal with letting go. It's a smart marketer that can delete 30% of the email list the right way and end up seeing positive gains! Get rid …

I really like my 2014 Lincoln MKZ. It's sort of the one flashy thing I own. I don't have a big house or wear fancy clothes, but I enjoy my nice ride. And I was really happy with my purchasing experience at Napelton Lincoln in Glenview , just outside of Chicago. Since I …

Mail.ru just announced that they're moving the domains mail.ua and corp.mail.ru to a restrictive "p=reject" DMARC policy on March 29, 2016. They previously announced that they were moving domains to "p=reject," beginning with the domain my.com this mont…

Steve Atkins of Word to the Wise just released a cool new tool: SPF Minimizer . Over on the Word to the Wise blog, he explains how it works and provides an extremely insightful explanation of do's and don'ts when it comes to SPF, aka Sender Policy Framework.

Once upon a time, Sender ID was a sort of Hotmail-specific version of Sender Policy Framework (SPF). It used to be valuable and necessary to maximize your chances at getting solid inbox deliverability at Hotmail. There used to be these tricks you had to do; like, if mail was b…

Over on Betanews, Ian Barker asks : "What do California and New York have in common? They're both major centers of spam email according to new research, between them accounting for almost half of spam sent in the US." Over here on Spam Resource, I ask: What do Uta…

My friend and deliverability colleague Josie Garcia sent me this picture yesterday. It's a picture of her printout of a specific page from this blog, from sometime around a hundred years ago. Specifically, it's a post from 2007 , where I replied to and rebutted a "…

SPF ( Sender Policy Framework ) still matters in 2016. Lots of folks might be authenticating with DKIM now, but SPF is a useful fallback mechanism and in my oh-so-humble opinion, everybody sending email with their own domain name should publish an SPF record. An SPF record is p…

Without the work of Ray and so many others, would I even have a career today? Rest in peace, good sir .

Don't go rushing out to buy a domain name under the ".download" TLD (top level domain) just yet; Spamhaus says just over three quarters of registered domains under that new TLD are bad news. This kind of data tends to lead spam filterers to treat all mail from t…

You may recall that Yahoo initially implemented a "p=reject" DMARC policy back in April, 2014 for their primary yahoo.com domain name. (And AOL did the same for aol.com shortly after.) This changed the email landscape significantly. Now, nearly two years later, the …